Don’t copy what’s not relevant

A nice word of caution from strategy+business magazine about looking for magic strategy answers by peering into the ways of superstars. In The Google Enigma, they point out that ‘Unless your company makes money by selling advertising attached to digital goods, you may not be able to learn much from Google’s example’. You can say that again! … the staggeringly powerful technology behind Google is so idiosyncratic to its case as to dwarf the contribution of almost anything else they may be good at.
Shame, then, that management development and MBA training puts so much reliance on case studies with way too little attention given to the relevance of those stories to other contexts.